Michael Tsarion – The Shadow Self

“I define a ‘good person’ as somebody who is fully conscious of their own limitations. They know their strengths, but they also know their ‘shadow’ – they know their weaknesses.

In other words, they understand that there is no good without bad. Good and evil are really one, but we have broken them up in our consciousness. We polarize them.” – John Bradshaw

In this YouTube video, Michael Tsarion brilliantly explains that denying parts of ourselves will not lead to personal transformation. We need to gather up all parts of ourselves and integrate them so ultimately we can transform ourselves into complete, whole beings.

What we deny or repress in ourselves, we will see in others and label them bad people when in fact we are just seeing the parts of ourselves that we have cast into the shadow.

Carl Jung – Human Psyche

Archetype – The archetype is a psychosomatic concept, linking body and psyche, instinct and image.

The Persona– The persona, for Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, was the social face the individual presented to the world—”a kind of mask, designed on the one hand to make a definite impression upon others, and on the other to conceal the true nature of the individual”.

The persona acts to shield the ego from negative images. Persona is derived from a Latin word that literally means “mask.” The persona is what we think we are, when in fact, it is literally just the tip of the iceberg of our whole being.

Ego – The ego is the organized part of the personality structure that includes defensive, perceptual, intellectual-cognitive, and executive functions. Conscious awareness resides in the ego, although not all of the operations of the ego are conscious.

According to Jung, the ego represents the conscious mind. Jung called the ego the center of consciousness, but he also stressed the limitations and incompleteness of ego as being something less than the whole personality. The ego provides a sense of consistency and direction in our conscious lives.

Shadow – In Jungian psychology, the shadow or “shadow aspect” may refer to an unconscious aspect of the personality which the conscious ego does not identify in itself.

Because one tends to reject or remain ignorant of the least desirable aspects of one’s personality, the shadow is largely negative, or the entirety of the unconscious, i.e., everything of which a person is not fully conscious.The Shadow is all that we dislike about ourselves or wish others not to see.

Anima/Animus – The anima and animus are described by Jung as elements of his theory of the collective unconscious, a domain of the unconscious that transcends the personal psyche.

In the unconscious of the male, this archetype finds expression as a feminine inner personality: anima; equivalently, in the unconscious of the female it is expressed as a masculine inner personality: animus.The anima/animus represents the “true self”.

Self – The Self in Jungian psychology is one of the Jungian archetypes, signifying the unification of consciousness and unconsciousness in a person, and representing the psyche as a whole.

The Self, according to Jung, is realized as the product of individuation, which in his view is the process of integrating one’s personality. The self is the ordering principle of the entire personality structure even though the ego can sometimes butt heads with it. The relation of the self to the ego is compared to that of ’the mover to the moved’.

Initially, the ego is merged with the self but then differentiates from it. Jung describes an interdependence of the two: the Self provides the more holistic view and is therefore supreme, but it is the function of ego to challenge or fulfill the demands of that supremacy.

If you ever feel like you are at odds with yourself, this is why. The ego receives the light from the Self as if lighting the way for the ego to journey along, but often times, the ego will resist. The ego acts autonomously and you literally have to negotiate with it, perhaps by writing out a contract. I know, sounds weird, but the ego is all about the material world, and material business.

Michael Tsarion – Shadow Self

Michael Tsarion: In psychological terms though, Pluto, Shiva, represents what is known in consciousness as the shadow self. Now you see in the schemata of consciousness we’re out here. We’re out here in the realm of persona which is the word for mask.

We’re out here in the Hollywood drama – the mask, the show of masks. We’ve become so identified with this extreme edge of consciousness; the fashions, what are we going to look like, appearances and the whole nine yards.

Now of course a certain amount of persona we need – otherwise we’ll be wide open to attack.

You need the mask in order to conceal your real identity, to protect yourself, and generally to operate in the world with other fellow human beings.

But we have way over-compensated for it. We put all our psychic energy into the mask. You only have to look at the cosmetic commercials to know that it’s obsessive right now. Behind that is the ego – the waking consciousness and its little battery runs down every 12 hours or so, so you need to sleep.

That’s because it’s finite, and it’s an energy, and you need to sleep to restore its energy. When we wake up in the morning we have a thing called Ego Consciousness, Ego Waking Consciousness. But the ego is a strange kind of thing – as I said it’s kind of young, and reckless, and wild, as well as very domineering.

And anything that your ego or you do not like about yourself you repress, and the repressions of all the stuff that you despise about yourselves become what’s known as the “Shadow Personality”.

And it’s kind of in the unconscious realm; it’s not even in the conscious realm because you’re not aware of it. It’s like the director’s cut of your life. See when you’re living your life and experiencing all sorts of things you want to have the nice clips that you cut out and put them on the coffee table – the family album.

But what about the backstory that’s really been filmed, that footage that you hide away that one day when you leave this planet is going to be played for you in the darkroom? They’re going to say, “Come this way, we got something to show you. Remember all that film you stored away in the attic (meaning your unconscious mind), we’re going to run you an amazing film here.”

This is a real slasher horror one; this is Stephen King and more. Want to see the John Carpenter you know, Friday the 13th part 14 – here it is. The shadow is the repressed stuff that we don’t show to the world and we even forget.

Now for those who find it hard to understand what repression is – it’s forgetting something and then forgetting that you forgot about it.

It’s the skeletons in the closet, and again it’s a very necessary part of the human mind, we need it to survive. It’s like the dumpster you need to throw the trash out. But we’ve again overcompensated. We’re doing it too much and it causes enormous psychic problems.

Carl Jung said. “That the shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort”. He’s talking spiritually there.

He’s saying that for you to be integrated you’re going to need to integrate with your shadow because those are aspects of yourself that you thrown away and you’re not getting to the light. You see the self; the true person is way back here. (Tsarion has a diagram in the video showing the many layers that cover up the true self, which is who you really are).

You can forget about the self we’re into ego world. And the ego is doing itself a disservice by constantly denying aspects of its own self. Now you know something, there were books left out of the Bible and it’s important to start finding out why.

Jesus said in the Gospel of Thomas, this is one of the great gnostic gospels that was thrown away, “When you see your likeness you rejoice, but when you see your images which come into existence before you which neither die nor are made manifest how much will you bear?

Now it’s a very flowery language – a different language, but can you see now what is being said here? When you see your likeness you rejoice, meaning when you’re in the persona and you’re in the world of – Oh I play the fashion game and everybody then gives me acknowledgement, and I give acknowledgement, you rejoice.

But when you see the primordial images which come into existence before you, but these which are neither die or made manifest meaning – the unconscious mind how much then will you bear?

It’s an old story and the teacher – remember the threat, you know what the teacher does, it goes project on me, come on dump it on me, and we do.

The teacher’s job is to take all of that as Carlos Castaneda and other writers have shown. The teacher is the guy we’re going to bury in the sand as we’ve done so many times before. The shadow is very powerful; it is a moral problem.

It destroys relationships and it destroys the teacher relationship with the one who’s receiving the teaching. Looking at who we are it’s all it’s about. The only solution is to look at who we are.

As Alexander Pope said, “Know then thyself presume not God the scan the proper study of man is man”.

William Blake said, “Thy own humanity learn to adore”.

But Carl Jung call put it this way, he said, “Look people will do anything, no matter how absurd, to stop from facing their souls”. Ever been outside recently? Ever turn on the TV recently, he’s exactly right.

People will do anything no matter how absurd. And all that carnival that you see out there, and all the distractions and nonsense that that this world is wall to wall full of – that’s what he’s talking about.

People believe I must live in the Bahamas; I must live in a one-season world I don’t want to be looking at any of that stuff. Well then okay, but then you just condemned the world to horrors, you’re just making a person in your life, your partner or your children the victims – the slaves to your inability to face yourself.

You’re now having a person fill your void in your emptiness because you’re not a whole person. And now you enslaved that wife, or that husband, or that child, or that animal or your workmates to your own form of tyranny.

You can’t call the police on it and you’ll never get the court over it to prove that it’s there – but it’s there. And basically repression doesn’t work – there’s a thing known as the return of the repressed. You can only dump so much of it before the stench starts to come back.

And as Carl Jung said in a well-known statement, he said, “When an inner situation is not made conscious it appears outside of you as fate.” Hahaha.

Because there’s a strange contract between the unconscious energy of our minds and the world, the energy that built the world. They conspired together; they’re built of the same stuff.

So behind the back of the ego – the unconscious mind – the shadow – conspires with life – with material existence to bring in front of you the very people, the very person, the very challenges right – to help you integrate when you won’t do it of your own free will.

And we call that living. All the stuff that happens around us that we often describe as difficult challenges – that’s what that is. We refuse to do the homework so were going to meet it in space and time.

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Hi, I’m Justin. In January 2011 I started Mazzastick as a place to share my thoughts about personal and spiritual growth with like-minded people. Mazzastick has won several personal growth awards and has been featured on many top websites. You can read more about me Here.

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